Tag Archives: postbin

Our beloved webhook debugging tool known as PostBin just got a little bit more useful. You can now include a URL in the query string when registering your PostBin callback that will get invoked when PostBin is posted to. This way you can use PostBin and still have your hook script run. Here’s an example of what it would look like:

Notice you can just prepend your existing callback URL with a PostBin URL and a question mark. In this way, PostBin becomes a decorator to your hook scripts.

A lot of work went into this and a lot of plumbing and debugging. PostBin uses Hookah to invoke your passthrough callback, making PostBin the first real user of a Hookah instance. Hookah was rewritten in Twisted and got a lot of tweaks to make this work. Please consider using Hookah to handle asynchronous callback dispatching in your apps!

PostBin has a number of features planned, including private bins, request replaying (so you can capture events, then replay them to your passthrough endpoint for debugging), filtering, and more.

MailChimp, an email marketing tool used by the likes of Firefox and Media Temple, recently announced the addition of web hooks to their API. Their primary use-case is to keep your email list in sync with theirs. They push to your callback URL with several types of events regarding list changes, including subscribes, unsubscribes, profile updates, cleaned addresses, and email changes.

Their API documention explains web hooks and how you use them with MailChimp. They also mention PostBin as an excellent utility to help see the event data as they’re triggered in their system.

One feature of web hooks is that they’re somewhat self documenting. With web APIs you need to know what you’re requesting and how to request it, but with web hooks, you’re just handed the data. Some of it might need explanation, but you can get started pretty quickly by just capturing actual data and seeing what it gives you. When I first started playing with web hooks, I wrote a handler script that would email me the data. This worked okay, but it could easily be better.

So today I’ve released PostBin, a tool for capturing and inspecting data from web hooks. It’s sort like of a cross between pastebin and Mailinator, but for HTTP POST requests. It’s very straightforward and simple. No signups, no configuration. Just click a button, get a bin with a unique URL, capture POST requests with that URL, then view those requests and the data in them at that URL.

The source is available and patches are welcome. If you have useful source changes to push back to me, they’ll likely be deployed to the production app running on Google App Engine. If you just have suggestions, you can leave them on our UserVoice page.